Night Shift - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/33/a-night-at-the-wiener-circle

This episode is sort of funny because I've noticed that when I deal with these topics I tend to wander a bit away from them or touch on them slightly, but then go stupid in the opposite direction and do whatever I want, and that's sort of what happened with this one. He starts off with an AMAZING opening that would actually sound really interesting - spending an entire night at an all night hot dog stand, recording stories, recording the crazy that is late night, and then the rest of the show happened and had little, if anything, to do with his all night romp through the underworld of late night hotdog stands. The best part is that at the end of the entire program he says that the un-aired stuff that they grabbed from the stand but weren't able to use would be used in a later program . . . I'm four episodes in the future from this one, and they have still yet to get back to the hotdog stand that I actually want to hear about. Back to what I actually want to talk about, the nigh shift.

When we first got married, I was hunting for a job and trying to be a big kid I needed a job, and that job, unfortunatley, was to work nights and weekends at a gas station.

When I think about night shifts and late shifts, I don't think about anything even slightly entertaining, I think of nothing but the most boring period of my life.

If you have never worked at a gas station, I strongly suggest that you never do it. What you don't know, because they're rules that only apply when no one else is in the store is that there are things that you can, and can't do. For example you can't sit on the counter, you can't sit down, you can't read, you can't listen to music too loud, you can't do much of anything besides stand behind the counter waiting for someone to show up. Near the end of the day there you get to do chores, and it's one of the only times in your life that you willingly rush to clean out coffee filters, toilets, and mop the floor because that's the most exciting thing that you could be doing at that point in time.

I wish that I could say that fun things happened, that characters showed up and life was interesting, but all thing considering, the people that you work with late night at a gas station are what really keeps the interest. Grown adults that keep telling you that they're going to nursing school when they finally get enough money together, and then blow it all on stupid things. People who eat snack foods from the gas station at the same rate as they make money, essentially making their paychecks pay for the snacks that they eat. Even adults that have real, full time, careers, and then for some unknown reason  that even when they explained it to you for the tenth time that night, made no sense of why they would need/want to have a job that pays a third of what they would make at their real job.

The one thing that is true, is that when you work the odd hours at a gas station, the "regulars" that show up night after night, week after week, are anything BUT regular people.

One of my favorite 'regular' customers was a 4'10" guy who would come in and buy an entire display box of 5 Hour Energy, or at least he'd buy 5-10 at a go. It would be 9:00 at night, or even later, and he'd come in, buy a dozen 5 Hour Energies, chug two of them while in the station, and start on his third on his way out the door. I can't even imagine his dependency on 5 Hour Energy drinks.

The only other regular that quickly comes to mind is the popcorn lady. The popcorn lady was from Spanish Fork (a nearby city that is at least a twenty minute drive) and she'd call ahead of time to ask if we had any popcorn from our popcorn machine left. She'd show up, and was a mouse of a lady. It honestly looked like the only thing she would eat was popcorn. She would squsih the box, tap it against he counter, and do everything she could to knock down the popcorn to try to prove that we weren't filling it up all the way. And after insisting that we give her a full box of popcorn after tapping everything down, she would pull out a wallet that she kept closed with multiple rubberbands to keep it from exploding open because it was full of old receipts and business cards from random places.

Just like the 5 Hour Energy guy, by the time she reached the sliding doors, she was three fists full of popcorn down into her box acting like it was the only thing in the world that she could eat.

Late nights at jobs are weird, but late nights at a gas station really pull out the weirdos, and only the super weird are out often enough to become regular customers.